Lieber Heiland, laß uns sterben

The music goes in and out of, and away from, and into again. Reality and poetry. The music is uninterested in genre denominations and ideological markers. Music grows and is shaped by and out of realities, living and artistic. Sound is an audible reflection of you. Even you in silence. And you from sound, from the particular music that invaded your way of life; the ever-increasing global audible pressure chamber in which your spirit falls again and again in a Sisyfonian way ...

Titles, on the other hand, are single-living creatures. Sometimes pointing to other titles, other phenomena, but usually standing entirely solitary, like pillars of stone in a desert, like rocks in a forest area.

Over, under and around, the music is moving and moving unobtrusively.

On Leiber Heiland, Laß uns Sterben historical events intersect right into the contemporary sound making, slit through their titles sharp cuts in our listening present era and pry our eyes towards the seemingly inexplicable backyard of history; which nevertheless created the plateau of disintegration and opportunity that we now seem to live on. At the same time all the sounds on this recording - all the scrunching, the breathing, all the tones, all the composed-processed material - completely and fully give themselves to the listener, escaping all human epithet making and denominations, as the sound becomes manifest, becomes apparent.

This is my wish. To contemplate names and sounds, around music and the name of music.

A couple of measured hours during a wondrous and almost tropical evening in May 2016, Jakob Riis and myself were in the Crypt of the Lund Cathedral, while student orchestras rehearsed with open windows near the old monastery park, birds were screaming and hot spring -high people raved just outside the crypt's small, low windows . The crypt is perhaps Sweden's oldest room still existing.

And precisely in this mysteriously echoing room, we were still in a hair-rasing now, rinsed clean by the music as big and tiny sounds ran in rays along the stone floor from the year 1121 providing some relief.

Reviews

Martin Küchen knows how to pick titles. It already starts with the title of the album; “Lieber Heiland, laß uns sterben” or in English: Dear Savior, let us die.

Küchen has furthermore selected titles for the tracks on this album with great care for choice of words and with a seemingly poetic intention.

The Cathedral in Lund (small city in the south of Sweden, 20km north-east of Malmö) was consecrated in 1145, however the crypt which is considered to be one of the ‘oldest rooms’ in Sweden and the recording place of this album, was actually in use already in 1123, and built in 1121. The crypt is pretty much intact since its construction. I’m hoping to one day return to live there as the years living in this culturally and academically rich city was some of the best years in my life.

You can walk around in the crypt ‘virtually’ if you head over to this website.

Reedist Küchen and sound engineer Jakob Riis went in to the crypt of the cathedral on an evening in May to make this album. It can be summarized as a journey inwards. It’s a calm space and a haven from a world that doesn’t have answers to the big questions of life and meaning anymore, yet seems to have no patience for the spaces in between words spoken. I feel that Küchen and Riis with this album opens the door to a room for reflection and with what’s heard on the album I’m offered time for contemplation and perhaps also thoughts about the big questions. The perishability of life is ever present, and accepted. Cheese and wine needs time to become tasty, interpersonal relations also need time to deepen and to become multidimensional. The sounds, screeches, breathing – even the ambience heard from around the cathedral – all fit into this concept of sounds happening there and then, but created in a historical context that is about 900 years old. I’m sharing my personal thoughts about how feelings I get while listening to this album.

The album starts off with the title track ‘Lieber Heiland, laß uns sterben’ which immediately sets the tone for this album, with breath meeting a sacral melody line. It’s then followed by ‘Music to silence music’ which also has almost congested breaths moving alongside clicks and notes. The droning sound effects in ‘Purcell in the eternal Deir Yassin’ is calming and soothing. There’s an anticipation of something that I can’t put words to, it’s hard to explain.

I first had a part in this review about how Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir Herr Jesu Christ” (I call to you…) meets “Küchens Ruf zu mir Bezprizoni” (Call me…) but when editing and re-reading it, I found that this was mostly a conversation in my head. Küchen manages to get me to drift off in thoughts about how songs, music, sounds and titles fit together and what that means.

But in the last song ‘Atmen Choir’ (Atmen means to breathe in German) the cathedral bells start to ring, and I realize it’s not for me to draw lines between titles, historic facts and feelings. I’ll leave that to you. And pick this one up, it’s a fantastic release from Küchen.

The sun is out, the temperature is great (not too warm, not too cold), a perfect day late August, so why
on earth did I decide to pick up a CD to review as the first thing on this beautiful day of which the title
is: ‘dear god, let us die’? Partly because I was already playing it and I didn’t look at the title too closely
yet. Titles are important here, it seems, ‘as historical events intersect right into the contemporary
sound making, slit through their titles sharp cites in our listening present era and pry our eyes towards
the seemingly inexplicable backyard of history’, Küchen writes on the press text, and I have no idea
what that means, but there is a picture of a concentration camp on the cover, and maybe it’s all
connected, image, text and such. Küchen plays alto and tenor saxophones, radio, iPod, electronic
tambura, speakers and Kapsch & Söhne speaker. Two of the five pieces are done with overdubs and
the others are unedited live recordings, which is something I must admit I didn’t hear easily, but now
I know I believe to hear also. Küchen is a well-known improviser and in his solo work he plays some
very haunting stuff, both live and overdubbed. In his live pieces it’s all a bit more traditionally
improvised, but all along the extra sound material he uses, it’s not some hectic, crazy saxophone
playing. This was recorded in a crypt in the Swedish city of Lund and that adds a wonderfully strange
atmosphere to the music. It’s a natural reverb, obviously perhaps, but it also seems to be placing a
‘cover’ over the music, making it less sharp and adds a melancholic tonal quality to the music. When
Küchen goes drone like, such as in the second half of ’Purcell In The Eternal Deir Yassin’ one no longer
believes to hear improvised music but some strange movie score, about, perhaps indeed, a monastery
with strange events going on. This I thought was an excellent CD.

But Martin Küchen‘s Lieber Heiland, laß ins stern is the most unsettling work we’ve heard this season. The labored breathing and bleak atmosphere make it sound more like a gas chamber than the crypt in which it was recorded. Still, there’s more to the music than fear; it offers a stark commentary on the human condition, a reminder of where we’ve been and never want to revisit

The fact this album is inspired by a visit to a cathedral crypt, in which distant orchestral rehearsals and cityscape sounds could be heard, might lead you to expect a hollow, ethereal, reverberant soundscape- but what it offers up is closer and more challenging than that. It certainly has a degree of that, but mixed in with some more artificially layered drones and some elements that have been seconded from the most experimental edges of jazz.

After the relatively run-of-the-mill drones and crisp rustling noises of the title track, second track “Music To Silence Music” is a piece of extremely out-there jazz, with flutes, plucked bass and varied percussion all fed through a variety of crunchy lo-fi processes into something vaguely evocative of a jungle. This set-up is continued somewhat into the eleven-minute “Purcell in the Eternal Deir Yassin” which puts a saxophone at the forefront, practically solo save for a wavy and unnerving bed of bottle-like drones and whispers and what sounds like the sound of a distant operatic rehearsal.

“Ruf zu mir, Bezprizorni…” combines a relatively innocuous bit of piano playing with some very intimately recorded sounds of breathing and (I think) blowing up balloons, and/or deliberately blowing through pipes. Again the lo-fi edges are a touch unpleasant and are seemingly there to deliberately counterpoint the purity of the grand piano in a way that borders on sarcastic.

The final and longest track, with the longest name (in full: “Atmen Choir (I det stora nedrivna rummet med bortvaênda kvinnoansikten, skylda av veck; bortsparkat, ihopfoêst segel, krossat roêtt tyg stelnar i vinterkylan”) is a more staccato affair, with a relatively barren and silent bed on which is placed rhythmic and gradually shifting spontaneous blowing noises, like an ensemble of musicians playing leftover large plastic plumbing tubes in an echo chamber.

At 35 minutes this is a relatively brief collection of sonic experiments that manage to be both fractious and silly in almost equal measure. It has grandiose aspirations and while it perhaps lacks the power to back them up, it’s imbued with a strong character that’s worthy of attention.

Put on the circuit via Norway's Sofa Music on September 8th, 2k17 is Martin Küchen's most recent album entitled "Lieber Heiland, Lass Uns Sterben", a thirtyfive minutes five track piece opening with the title track which is a siren'esque, yet distorted and saddening fusion of wind instruments and harsh, electronic Noize whereas "Music To Silence Music" follows a similar, more lively path with a hint of percussion and elements of Jazz around the corner. Following up is "Purcell In The Ethernal Deir Yassin", providing more of a droning, Ambient-influenced approach sporting oriental bits and echoes of what could be EthioJazz-infused melodic structures and haunting ghosts of fading operas whilst "Ruf Zu Mir, Bezprizoni..." caters tender piano melodies contrasted by harsh, non-tonal experiments on wind instruments and the final, epicly named "Atmen Choir (I Det Stora Nedrivna Rummet Met Bortvända Kvinnoansikten, Skylda Av Veck; Bortsparkat, Ihopföst Segel. Krossat Rött Tyg Stelnar I Vinterkylan...)" brings in scattered, rasping signals travelling through the stereo field atop an irritating, non-identifyable musical recording appearing in the very background to sensitive ears only. Good stuff, this.